While I don’t blog a lot personally, I tend to write posts about major life transitions (like this one and this one).  So here’s one more.  One that I’m very excited for.

From 2010-2012 my commute took almost 3 hours round trip.  Every day.  So when I started looking to leave that job, one of my criteria was ideally to find a job with a shorter commute.  Of course the most important things are the job itself and the company, but finding something where I could spend more time at work and with my family was also important.

When I connected with the team at Ektron, I knew it was a good fit.  It got me back to a horizontal technology, and helping people build great websites.  It also fit my product marketing sweet spot, providing lots of opportunities to work on the things I love to do.  Plus it was a much shorter commute in terms of time.  I’d cut my commute time in almost half.   It was a long drive from home to the office in my opinion but well worth it.  I’ve racked up more than 21,000 miles over the past year plus making the commute.

Shortly after I started at Ektron, I had the opportunity to expand my scope and skills by taking on responsibility for both product and inbound/content marketing.  Now I’ve been creating content to drive marketing results for a long time, (longer than I’m going to share here), but having the chance to build my skills and our team to use content to help prospects find us, engage and convert was extremely exciting.

Over the past year, I’ve seen the power of content, and found religion – great content, in my opinion, is the foundation of almost all marketing today.  Without that content, your marketing efforts are less impactful and more expensive.  And who wants that?

Content marketing has become one of, if not the hottest concepts in marketing today.   The Google Trends below support that.

At the same time, content management (Ektron’s core business) is a much tougher business proposition.  Content management is from dead, as everyone needs it, and most people already have it, but it can be a long, tough sell.

While I was building my content marketing skills and having become truly convinced that this was the way forward, I had the opportunity to meet and work with the world’s leading content marketing evangelist, Joe Pulizzi, from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI).  If you know anything about Joe, or CMI, you know that orange is their official color.  And content marketing is taking off.  So the way I see it, orange is the new black.  Sorry, just had to get that in there. 

Joe and I chatted about ways I could help CMI grow.  It was pretty exciting to me.  The job built on what I loved to do and would also give me an opportunity to develop new skills.  In a super hot space.   And I wouldn’t have to commute.  At all.

As much as I loved the people at Ektron, and was excited about some of the cool stuff the company was working on, I knew that all these journeys happen for a reason.  21,000 miles later, I knew that joining the CMI team was the next stop on this roadtrip.

Today’s my first day at CMI.  The 5 steps and 3 seconds it took to walk from my kitchen to the office was the best commute I’ve seen in well, ever.  The daily journey will be much shorter, but extremely exciting.   I can’t wait to get behind the wheel.